Depletion calculations based on perturbations. Application to the study of a REP-like assembly at beginning of cycle with TRIPOLI-4®. (May 2015) - Dieudonné, Cyril
Highlights: Monte-Carlo burnup simulations are often used as reference calculations. Monte-Carlo burnup simulations suffers however of prohibitive calculation times. This paper proposes a method to accelerate Monte-Carlo burnup codes. This method factorizes the transport steps using the correlated sampling method. Abstract: Monte-Carlo burnup calculations are nowadays the reference method to obtain fuel inventories in reactor configurations. Their main drawback is the very long computing time associated with the calculation. A method is presented here which attempts to speed up the calculation by replacing full simulations by perturbation calculations based on correlated sampling. The method is tested in a PWR assembly configuration and numerical results are given for the figure of merit. These results show that a speed-up of up to a factor of 5 can be achieved.